📍 University Circle

Virtue and Adornment in Byzantium: Beautiful Bodies in the Christian East

 

Start: September 28, 2025 2:00 pm
End: September 28, 2025 3:00 pm

Cleveland Museum of Art
Address:
11150 East Blvd.
Cleveland, OH – 44106-1797

Admission Price: Free

Join Alicia Walker as she explores attitudes toward women and adornment in the Byzantine world. Walker discusses how jewelry and clothing decorated with Christian signs offered women ways to ornament the body while still conforming to religious values that censured personal embellishment and promoted modest piety. At the same time, Byzantine society remained connected to pre-Christian cultural traditions, allowing for Greco-Roman goddesses and other female mythological characters to persist as models for the cultivation of physical beauty and allure. Walker shows how Byzantine women navigated these diverse possibilities, displaying moral virtue and social refinement—but also captivating charm—through their dress and adornment. This lecture is sponsored by the Hellenic Preservation Society of Northeastern Ohio.

 

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